Sensory Systems

Recall cards on animal sensory systems: how sensory reception, transduction, and perception work, receptor types and receptive fields, receptor potentials, the labeled-line principle, and Weber's Law; somatosensation (the skin layers and the four somatosensory receptor classes, the tactile mechanoreceptors, proprioceptors, baroreceptors, thermoreception, nociception, and two-point discrimination); taste and smell (the five tastes, papillae and taste buds, salt and sour versus sweet, bitter, and umami transduction, the olfactory epithelium and bulb, combinatorial odor coding, and pheromones); hearing and vestibular sensation (sound as pressure waves, the outer, middle, and inner ear, the cochlea and basilar membrane, place theory, and the utricle, saccule, and semicircular canals); and vision (light and the eye, refractive errors, rods and cones, rhodopsin phototransduction, trichromatic cones, retinal circuitry and lateral inhibition, and the pathway to the visual cortex).